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Cloud costs are in a bubble

the-investing-desk.com

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Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#81

Post by Macha »

r0m4n0 wrote: post #56
jimhi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Startups have to show growth and/or revenue. They dump most of their funding into advertising. Many are spending more than the lifetime value of their customers (if that can even be calculated at their stage at all). Interest rates go up -> VC Money goes down -> Advertising budgets go down Online advertising is "theoretically" better than other advertising. You can track exactly how it converts to sales or not. It is…

Interest rate increases are causing money to move around for sure. I’m just not convinced startups are the primary buyer of these online ads. Hell I would barely even consider them a drop in the bucket. Im sure basically every Fortune 500 and brick and mortar store have hefty online ad spends now a days. I suppose we will see soon enough

Yeah, this isn't the dotcom era when internet ads was mainly startups buying ads on Yahoo thereby inflating their own value and Yahoo's value. The standard online advertisers are the standard advertisers these days (apart from a few smaller islands like podcasts or integrated sponsors on youtube), so it'd be a bigger recession to impact adtech, and the impact there is more likely to be in line with the impact to the rest of the economy than disproportionate popping.

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#82

Post by OrvalWintermute »

I've always thought cloud costs have been excessive profit centers, and this goes back to before it was called cloud with "ASPs" in regulated industries product offerings.

Early days I remember looking at Cloud vendors that were offering FISMA virtualization capabilities and I did an analysis of alternatives around running a set amount of CPUs, RAM, i/o and disk to support VMs. Terremark was the first offering that could meet our reqs, at around 10k a month per for a server's equivalent capability.

This put in my mind from day one that I was trading off High Capex with low Opex, for No Capex and High Opex. Given our trades, it was clear that high Capex was preferable to high Opex, as our high capex would have been equal to one month's opex.

When we later on saw more mainstream vendors like Amazon move into the space, their offerings were also coming with insane overhead, $2000 a month automatic surcharges for a FISMA regulated environment.

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#83

Post by viridian »

cpursley wrote: post #8

Why are people still using Mongo when you can just set up a jsonb column in Postgres now? Is this just legacy applications that are stuck with Mongo? Certainly nobody is starting new projects on Mongo? Serious question.

In the vast majority of cases these days I'd rather have a dumb document database to shove my data into rather than fretting over relationships between tables with a RMDBS where complexity grows at best, quadratically.

I don't use mongodb in particular but I never want to go back to worrying about what a SQL application instance is up to, either.

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#84

Post by altdataseller »

turtlebits wrote: post #66
queezey wrote: post #3

Related reading from DHH (creator of Ruby on Rails, Basecamp, and Hey): https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47...

All of these posts never seem to talk about the operational overheard they're saving by using the cloud. 500k/year is a couple of engineers. And IME, at scale, Elasticsearch is a huge pain to self manage.

Self hosting has become very easy these days. Elasticsearch, specifically was a pain to self manage years ago. With modern versions, it has become incredibly stable, defaults have made more sense, and you now have modern tools like Kubernetes to make deploying/scaling easier too. The work required to self-host has improved in the past decade, and ppl who "default to the cloud" ignore this.

I'm saying this as someone who manages a 50 TB cluster for a startup (which I know isn't a HUGE amount, but definitely not small either)

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#85

Post by randomdata »

mnd999 wrote: post #67
slt2021 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

same as why people use Oracle/SQL Server when there is free SQLite? because that is how they compare feature wise. postgres is not easily comparable to mongo, these are totally different db engines with different tradeoffs made for different purposes.

SQLite isn’t really comparable to Oracle or SQL Server though. It’s an embedded database. Probably you meant Postgres there too?

Oracle and SQL Server are also embedded databases that happen to have a networking layer on top. And, given the context, a networking layer is likely what you're building anyway.

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#86

Post by slt2021 »

queezey wrote: post #3

Related reading from DHH (creator of Ruby on Rails, Basecamp, and Hey): https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47...

cannot upvote this enough. DHH perfectly explained what is wrong with cloud. Constant gaslighting from cloud marketing about: capital costs, human cost, hardware cost, etc., while ignoring all negatives of cloud.

Cloud computing is pure scam. you rent 1 vCPU and people often think this is as good as a real 1 hardware core, while in reality that physical core is being sold twice/three times to different customer. Your 1 vCPU is maybe 0.5-0.75 of a real hardware CPU, perhaps even less, depending on how greedy cloud provider is.

It is almost like instead of driving your own car and making stable car payment - you decide to exclusively use Uber/Lyft to go around. Sounds good if you are in NYC/SF, but not so much outside of these perfect use cases. Also doesn't make sense if your primary job is pizza delivery, all your margins from delivering pizzas will just transfer to ride hailing company.

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#87

Post by janee »

cpursley wrote: post #8

Why are people still using Mongo when you can just set up a jsonb column in Postgres now? Is this just legacy applications that are stuck with Mongo? Certainly nobody is starting new projects on Mongo? Serious question.

I found having big doc store tables in Postgres became harder to manage as time went by from a people perspective.

E.g. around the 300GB mark I had to constantly remind myself and others to be careful of it because it might have normal relational columns you think are fine to query, but it also has a fat json payload on each row and if you're careless the query planner would basically do a table scan for things you wouldn't expect.

This isn't so much a problem with json in an rdbms but more the false sense of query performance on non-json columns in the same table...after moving it to mongo never had the same problems because people knew not to query it in an unsupported manner.

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#88

Post by derefr »

adoxyz wrote: post #24
tomgs wrote: post #17

I find it interesting that there are two MongoDb Directors of Developer Relations in this thread - one former, one current - either attempting to replicate the suggested costs to see if the author's faking it, or outright blaming him he is. Dude's got a screenshot. I doubt he faked it for the attention - he probably actually got that bill. He feels it's expensive and he should pay less for the value he's getting cons…

Editing a screenshot to push a narrative is pretty easy. I'm no longer with MongoDB, although still a big fan of the product, but I'm more curious as to how you could rack up a $2,500 bill just trying the product out, especially the serverless offering, coupled that with the guy being a "twitter investor", so that kicked off my BS detector. MongoDB Atlas runs on the big 3 clouds, and of course you're going to pay mor…

> racking up $2,500 in serverless compute charges in 24 hours seems very very hard to do

TBH I know how to spend that much and more with a single query (and ~30 minutes of compute time) in BigQuery. Serverless BI analytics workloads over large public datasets can do amazing things... and are also exactly the sorts of things a naive user would use to test + benchmark the capabilities of serverless data-warehousing systems.

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#89

Post by lee101 »

This is already happening, check out https://text-generator.io around 10x cheaper than OpenAI for text-generation also has speech-to-text 8x cheaper than Google cloud.

New era of cost-cutting, running systems yourself and distributed computing will bring far cheaper prices soon. If we do well energy and computation/intelligence will be trending toward 0 generally speaking

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#90

Post by cpursley »

janee wrote: post #87
cpursley wrote: post #8

Why are people still using Mongo when you can just set up a jsonb column in Postgres now? Is this just legacy applications that are stuck with Mongo? Certainly nobody is starting new projects on Mongo? Serious question.

I found having big doc store tables in Postgres became harder to manage as time went by from a people perspective. E.g. around the 300GB mark I had to constantly remind myself and others to be careful of it because it might have normal relational columns you think are fine to query, but it also has a fat json payload on each row and if you're careless the query planner would basically do a table scan for things you w…

Interesting, something to keep in mind!
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